Choose Your Own (Viva) Adventure
An Ergodic Displacement Activity by Kevan Manwaring
(Diary of a Viva Ninja: Day 30)
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YOU have heard talk of the fabled treasure of Phire-top Mountain in your village local, The Knackered Nag. Going slowly blind drinking pint after pint of Old Bastard every night along with the rest of the reprobates who frequented that unsalubrious hostelry seemed less of an enticing career option when you caught wind of a noisome conversation between two broken vagabonds, gibbering about the dreaded Thesis-Beast and its endless revisions, the Ordeal-by-Viva and the feared Academics of Phire-top Mountain: They Who Guard The Treasure Which None May Look Upon Without Going Mad! Not having anything really to do for the next few years, you decide to set off and win this treasure…
Page 1
After many terrible ordeals, diversions, redrafts, cancelled trains, interminable conference papers, word-blindness, back-ache, RSI, piles, and overdrafts you finally make it to the threshold of the Room of Testing, atop Phire-top Mountain (Room 1309). Armed with your trusty Shield of Deflection, Potion of Answering, Mirror of Critical Scrutiny, and Water-bottle of Procrastination, you cross the threshold. In the small room rammed to the ginnels with musty tomes, a midden of coffee cups and muffin wrappers, and empty wine bottles there sit three Level 7 Academics of the Arcane School of Obscurity. In front of them is an empty chair. Do you…
Say hello and enter the room?
Run screaming from the tower back to your village?
Use a Dazzle Spell from your Phone of Mobility to temporarily blind them while you snatch away their notes and make a run for it?
Page 34
One of the Level 7 Academics introduces herself as ‘Ye Chair’, and then introduces her colleagues – one she calls an ‘Internal’ and the other, an ‘External’, although this pays no correlation to the arrangement of their bodily organs. They ask you to take a seat. Do you…
Grab the empty chair and run from the room?
Take the opportunity to show off your breakdance routine?
Sit down?
Page 21
The internal asks you ‘Can you give us a summary of your project?’ Do you…
Provide a snappy 5-10 minute introduction to your Quest to Quell the Thesis-Beast?
Provide a 30-60 minute blow-by-blow account of Your Interminable Quest?
Start explaining the Secret of the Ninety-Nine Worlds?
…
To be continued!
(With apologies to Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson – & the illustrators whose fab work I have shamelessly snaffled from the internet – and gratitude for many happy hours of rolling the dice and turning the pages…)
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